I spent last week at BlackHat in DC. As usual, I really enjoyed it. There were many really great technical talks. My favorite was a talk entitled "Attacking Intel® Trusted Execution Technology" by a team at the Invisibility Things Lab. One of the reasons that I really liked this talk was because it presented results from an in-depth, long research project. These are not researchers who were looking for a quick way of getting a catchy title out there. They painstakingly studied the new Intel infrastructure and came back with good and bad news. The good news: this is really the right direction, and Intel has made a great contribution with this technology. The bad news: there are still problems, and in particular, it is possible to attack the secure loading process. This is also a great differentiator: rather than blasting Intel over the security flaw, the researchers gave an objective overview and gave both praise and criticism.

This is what great research is all about. Take the time to carry out an in-depth study on an important subject and then report the results, both good and bad. This team did a great job, and it showed. Their presentation was well accepted and appreciated.

Just one more comment: there were many other great talks at BlackHat that also presented high quality research, so my above statement is not to the detriment of anyone else.